Parenting & Family Quote by Michael Tilson Thomas

There is a quiet grief tucked into Michael Tilson Thomas's nostalgia: not for "the good old days", but for a muscle we've let atrophy. His point lands because it treats singing less as a talent and more as infrastructure - a civic technology people used to share without thinking. The memory he reaches for isn't Carnegie Hall; it's religious training and summer camp, the unglamorous assembly lines of communal music-making where you learned repertoire the way you learned manners.

The subtext is an indictment of how culture got professionalized and privatized. Singing used to be baked into institutions that repeated weekly, seasonally, automatically. Now music is something we stream, curate, and consume through headphones, optimized for individual taste and frictionless silence between people. When he says "you'd learn to sing a lot of songs", he's really describing a lost commons: shared lyrics, shared melodies, shared occasions to be slightly unselfconscious in public.

Tilson Thomas, a conductor who has spent his life surrounded by virtuosity, is making a counterintuitive argument: the future of music depends on amateurs. Not as patrons, but as participants. There's also an implicit warning about what disappears when you stop singing together - memory, intergenerational transmission, the ability to feel your body sync with other bodies. In an era of curated identity, communal singing is one of the last practices that asks you to blend in on purpose.